Many distributed electronic transaction processing systems are known, the most ubiquitous being that in which point of sale terminals are configured as card payment terminals for use with individual payment cards, which have financial account and/or cardholder data encoded thereon, in a magnetic strip and/or an embedded EEPROM or ‘chip’. During a transaction, a card payment terminal typically reads the encoded data from the card memory means and connects to a plurality of remote terminals over a network, for purposes of card authentication, checking funds availability, personal identification number verification, transaction authorising and processing, all being implemented as local and/or remote data communication messages.
Millions of such electronic transactions are processed across the world on a daily basis, in ever greater numbers, and the data processing and networking infrastructure required to support them represents a significant cost, spread across the card schemes which administer payment card data and transaction settling systems, the financial organisations which administer the payment card systems and transaction authorising systems, and the retailers and service providers themselves. Further cost considerations arise from the constant requirement to improve system and card data security, and the need to manage growing systemic complexity inherent to the global scale of card payment systems.
In this context, technological updates demanded by users for increasing their control over, and the convenience of conducting, electronic transactions, are increasingly fraught by scaling considerations. Recently, there has been a drive to enable the interoperability of personal communication devices, such as mobile telephone handsets, with electronic card payment systems.
Recent systems developed for this purpose typically interface a customer's mobile terminal with a proximate point of sale terminal, by means of either reconfiguring the point of sale terminal with an additional, wireless local networking device or apparatus, or simply changing the point of sale terminal altogether for a newer model having such wireless local networking functionality built-in. DE102007005427 discloses such a system, wherein a point of sale terminal (POS) is reconfigured or otherwise interfaced with an RFID device, and wherein each electronic transaction is processed through a combination of local data communications between a customer's mobile communication terminal and the RFID device and remote data communications between the POS and a remote trust centre system.
Such systems have not been widely adopted so far, because all actors in distributed electronic transaction processing systems, i.e. card schemes, financial organisations, retail organisations and now mobile phone handset manufacturers, have failed to agree a common technical approach, resulting in disparate solutions which are either unable to accommodate most mobile phone handsets or which are simply uneconomical: traditionally, rolling out a new payment mechanism involves the take-up of corresponding acceptance hardware that is integrated with the point of sale terminal, which is expensive and requires costly support and maintenance, particularly in its early adoption phase.
As the challenges remain to efficiently, conveniently and cost-effectively connect most types of customer mobile terminals with merchant's point of sale terminals in stores, and to thereafter reliably and securely process electronic transactions between merchants and users of these customer mobile terminals, a new distributed electronic transaction processing system is required, which obviates at least some of the disadvantages associated with the prior art systems.